Battle Slots Review

Date: 5/31/2011

By Ned Jordan

PuzzleQuest took a lot of people by surprise with its unique puzzle game-RPG
genre mash-up, and there have been a long line of imitators in its wake trying
to capitalize on its success. Battle Slots is one such game, although you can
hardly call the slot machine play at its core a puzzle. Most of what you find
wrapped around the slot machine play in the game is lifted from PuzzleQuest,
from a world which must be traversed by moving between nodes on a map to quests
which all boil down to dueling some sort of creature on a puzzle board. The one
big difference is that rather than besting enemies at a round of Bejeweled you
must beat them with your magical slot machine.

There's a hokey story behind the game that involves your character finding a
magic slot machine and then using said slot machine to defeat everyone else
lugging a magic slot machine around the kingdom, but hopefully you aren't
playing these types of games for their stories. And since the game doesn't have
a whole lot to it outside of the slot machine battle mechanic, I'll just focus
on that for the rest of this review.

When you battle a creature or some other enemy, you each have your own slot
machine and you alternate taking spins and seeing what happens. The slot
machines in the game resemble those that you find in a modern casino in that
they have pay lines crisscrossing the nine symbols displayed on the screen after
a spin. If you're only familiar with the traditional match three across slot
machines, then it will pay to spend a little time with the game's instructions
explaining how the various pay lines work. Or not. It doesn't really matter if
you know what's going on or not, because like all slot machines it boils down to
"push the button and we'll tell you if you've won" play.

The game allows you to customize your slot machine somewhat by letting you
mix and match the machine's symbols. You may be playing as a warrior and want to
load your machine with physical damage symbols at the expense of mana ones, or
you may want to try to add some special symbols that will help you to accumulate
more experience or gold at the end of a battle. This is a somewhat decent
attempt to add an element of strategy to the game, but the battles are still
pretty passive affairs due to the nature of slot machines. You push the spin
button and hope that you accumulate some mana for a spell to damage your
opponent or something of the like, and then you watch your opponent do the same.
Unless you're already enamored with playing slot machines, it's hard to imagine
that you'll find the whole random and passive nature of slot machines to make
things all that interesting or enjoyable.

Final Rating:
64%. Battle Slots is not really a puzzle-RPG game,
it's a slot machine game and is ultimately as exciting as playing a slot machine
without the financial upside.